The Importance of Reducing Your Compliance Management Workload
Why is compliance important?
Enforcing compliance helps you prevent and detect infractions to resolve and avoid fines and lawsuits.
It can be said that compliance management is a continuous job.
Just as one regulation gets introduced, and testing or compliance training is completed, there is another new regulation on the horizon.
This can be quite overwhelming, however; there are ways you can reduce your compliance management workload whilst remaining on task and compliant.
Here are a few tips to help you.
Improve collaboration with a compliance management system
What is a compliance management system?
It is a system that provides central compliance documentation storage, enabling you to track approvals and policy updates, functions, processes, controls, and tools that help your organization comply with legal requirements to mitigate risk.
Compliance is just one department, however; its reach affects every department in the organisation.
This is why it is pertinent to provide seamless communication and collaboration through the use of compliance management tools.
Simply tracking approvals and policy changes can be exhausting as it can involve tracking down the updated policy version and documenting if it was approved by the compliance management team or individual board members.
This is an inefficient use of your time.
Rather than searching for ways to get management and individual board members to review your documents, you might consider integrating software for compliance management.
While there are tasks that are burdensome, do they really have to be so?
Not every task or project can be simplified with a workflow. Certain tasks are just heavy lifts, regardless of the approach you use. This then begs the question, are you the individual to do that?
You are highly trained as a compliance professional, meaning you have the skills and expertise that is unique to that institution.
This enables you to provide strategic planning insights, advise on ways to evade compliance difficulties when new services, initiatives, and products are considered.
You should be able to conduct compliance testing to make sure procedures and policies are being met. This also includes effective controls to alleviate compliance risks.
You can discover new ways to creatively apply new regulations in a manner that best suits your organisation’s product, complexity and size mix.
This can be difficult to achieve if you are overwhelmed with daily compliance tasks, particularly those that don’t require your unique institutional knowledge.
For instance, quite a number of compliance professionals spend hours on new regulations, reading and interpreting them. When considerable regulatory change occurs, reading regulations can become a full-time job, however, it doesn’t have to be.
When it comes to tasks like tracking changes to regulations, these tasks can be outsourced in a cost-effective manner to knowledgeable counsel.
You can employ a compliance management software solution to automatically identify and alert you to the necessary regulatory changes, whilst providing you with an action plan for implementation.
Using a compliance management platform can be a great time saver, especially as it is overseen by the appropriate regulatory counsel.
Develop workflows or blueprints for repetitive activities
It can be said that the majority of your mental load has to deal with repetitive compliance tasks, such as:
● Updating or drafting procedures and policies as a result of regulatory change
● Identifying appropriate regulatory changes
● Confirming employee compliance training
● Sharing procedure and policy updates with required staff
● Testing regulatory compliance ensuring your compliance management system is properly functioning
● Tracking consumer complaints
● Reporting to the board and management
Is there a way you approach your tasks or are they approached like a blank slate?
If it is the latter, developing a workflow or blueprint can help lighten your mental workload. Every one of the tasks mentioned above has repeatable stages.
For instance, implementing regulatory change can impact a different business line or department as well as different staff, however, the foundational process is still the same, including determining its impact on the organisation, identifying the rule, drafting procedures, policies, and more.
When developing a task workflow, ensure that you include the individual responsible for each task and when the task is expected to be completed.
Ensure you discover a way to integrate this into your CMS or compliance management system. Your CMS can help give a task oversight for management purposes, centralise communication and develop exam-ready audit trails to automate workflows which can then reduce your mental workload.
Identify the mental load you carry and discover a way to place them down
There are tasks that we feel are constantly hanging over our heads. They are an unseeable weight that increases stress in our work lives.
Psychologists identify “mental load” as work that constantly requires coordination and remembrance of activities.
Simply put, the mental load isn’t just the cause of a single task, rather, it is the collective burden placed on you by having so many pieces to track.
To combat this, you need to take a bit of time to create a list of projects, activities and tasks that seemingly are a continuous source of worry.
It could be something as mundane as continuously reminding employees to finish compliance training, worrying if your institution is up to date, meeting the deadline to report data and more.
It could even be all of them at once!
Try to go through each of the tasks to figure out why it is such a burden mentally. You might discover that it isn’t actually the individual task that is the issue, but it is mostly down to having to manage so many tasks.
Conclusion
Due to the importance of compliance management, your work as a compliance offer is never truly done, but it need not be overwhelming. You should take the time to ponder your mental load plus ways you can reduce it. Doing so might just be a lot more seamless than you think.
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RADD LLC is a full-service compliance and internal audit firm. If you need assistance with Fair Lending or any other project, please reach out to our team by scheduling an appointment through our website.
The Importance of Reducing Your Compliance Management
